'Flying' submarine making an innovative splash

Graham Hawkes stands next to the DeepFlight Super Falcon, a two-person submersible vessel that his company sells.

Graham Hawkes stands next to the DeepFlight Super Falcon, a two-person submersible vessel that his company sells.

Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

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Graham Hawkes stands next to the DeepFlight Super Falcon, a two-person submersible vessel that his company sells.

Graham Hawkes stands next to the DeepFlight Super Falcon, a two-person submersible vessel that his company sells.

Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

'Flying' submarine making an innovative splash

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Behind closed doors at a workshop near the quiet waters of Brickyard Cove in Point Richmond is one of the most exotic vessels in the world - a "flying" submarine.

It looks a bit like a fish with stubby wings, can swim with the sharks and dive like a whale, and one just like it can be yours, custom-built for a mere $1.7 million.

"It is like an airplane with wings upside down," said Graham Hawkes, founder and chief technical officer of Hawkes Ocean Technologies. "It is like flying in the air, but we are flying underwater."

Using wings the way fish use fins, his submersible, called the DeepFlight Super Falcon, can do barrel rolls underwater, dive straight down, or make sharp turns.

The DeepFlight submersible, which can carry two people seated under Plexiglas domes, is 21 feet long with a wingspan of 9 feet. It weighs 4,00o pounds.

Hawkes, a British-trained engineer, likes to talk about underwater cruises in the Super Falcon in Lake Tahoe, or places like the Gulf of Aqaba in the Middle East. And there was the time he and a client were moving along the Pacific Coast of Mexico and swam, as it were, alongside a great white shark that he thinks was 20 feet long. The shark came very close and gave the sub a hard glance, he said.

"I was staring into the cold eye of this ... this ... animal," Hawkes said. "It was awe inspiring."

It was also an adventure, and that is the market for the DeepFlight Super Falcon. His companion that day was Richard Branson, the airline billionaire. "It was the first time a mini-sub ever had a chance to fly with a great white," Branson wrote in a blog. "What a privilege it was."

Hawkes, Branson wrote, was "a genius."

At 66, Hawkes has 45 years' experience in underwater engineering. Among other things, he has developed diving suits and deep diving submarines. In 1985, Hawkes set the solo depth record - 3,000 feet under the surface - aboard a submarine of his design called Deep Rover.

Inventor, adventurer

Hawkes is famous in the undersea world. He is an inventor, designer and adventurer in one package. The BBC called him "an underwater maverick."

He does not look the part. Hawkes is of medium size, wears round glasses that make him look a bit like an owl, and speaks so softly he often has to repeat himself.

But his goals are clear: He plans to sell his submersibles to clients like Branson and others in his financial class, people interested in what Karen Hawkes, his wife and the company vice president for marketing, calls "private exploration and adventure."

It is an endeavor that only the very wealthy can afford - "people with who have mega yachts," Graham Hawkes said.

It is the ultimate niche market. Hawkes believes there are about 7,000 supersize luxury yachts on the oceans of the world. What he wants to provide to their owners is the opportunity to own an onboard private submersible to offer guests the chance to explore what he calls "the ocean planet."

"This is the very beginning of the era of private ocean exploring," he said.

At the very least, one could ride aboard a flying sub and swim with the dolphins, or look down from the twilight zone of filtered sunlight into what deep sea divers call "the darkness below."

Training sessions

Hawkes Ocean Technologies offers a training course with each purchase. At the very minimum, it takes three days to learn how to operate a Super Falcon.

So far, his customers include Branson and Tom Perkins, the Bay Area venture capitalist. On a trailer at the Point Richmond workshop is a new Super Falcon being built for Dietrich Mateschitz, the Austrian entrepreneur who made a mint from Red Bull, the energy drink.

"He called last Christmas and placed an order later last year," Karen Hawkes said.

The new boat, which takes about nine months to build, has a pressure hull built of carbon fiber, is powered by lithium batteries, mounted aft. There is a single propeller. The craft will be delivered in April.

About 500 feet deep is the limit of underwater flight, but Graham Hawkes says it can go to 1,000 feet down. The crush depth - or absolute limit - is 2,500 feet, he said.

"It looks like a James Bond wild machine," said Karen Hawkes, "but it is positively buoyant, so it's really safe."

In fact, Graham Hawkes built a submersible that was used in the 1981 James Bond film "For Your Eyes Only." Hawkes piloted the vessel himself.